He reached behind himself to the other end table and got his cigarettes.

"You shouldn't smoke," Moira Wolfe told him.

He smiled. "I know. I must quit. But after what you have done to me," he said with a twinkle in his eye, "I must gather myself." Silence.

" Madre de Dios ," he said after another minute.

"What's the matter?"

Another mischievous smile. "Here I have given myself to you, and I hardly know who you are!"

"What do you want to know?"

A chuckle. A shrug. "Nothing important - I mean, what could be more important than what you have already done?" A kiss. A caress. More silence. He stubbed out the cigarette at the halfway point to show that her opinion was important to him. "I am not good at this."

"Really?" It was her turn to chuckle, his turn to blush.

"It is different, Moira. I - when I was a young man, it was understood that when - it was understood that there was no importance, but... now I am grown, and I cannot be so..." Embarrassment. "If you permit it, I wish to know about you, Moira. I come to Washington frequently, and I wish... I am tired of the loneliness. I am tired of... I wish to know you," he said with conviction. Then, tentatively, haltingly, hopeful but afraid, "If you permit it."

She kissed his cheek gently. "I permit it."

Instead of his own powerful hug, Cortez let his body go slack with relief not wholly feigned. More silence before he spoke again.

"You should know about me. I am wealthy. My business is machine tools and auto parts. I have two factories, one in Costa Rica, the other in Venezuela. The business is complicated and - not dangerous, but... it is complicated dealing with the big assemblers. I have two younger brothers also in the business. So... what work do you do?"

"Well, I'm an executive secretary. I've been doing that kind of work for twenty years."

"Oh? I have one myself."

"And you must chase her around the office..."

"Consuela is old enough to be my mother. She worked for my father. Is that how it is in America? Does your boss chase you?" A hint of jealous outrage.

Another chuckle. "Not exactly. I work for Emil Jacobs. He's the Director of the FBI."

"I do not know the name." A lie. "The FBI, that is your federales , this I know. And you are the chief secretary for them all, then?"

"Not exactly. Mainly my job is to keep Mr. Jacobs organized. You wouldn't believe his schedule - all the meetings and conferences to keep straight. It's like being a juggler."

"Yes, it is that way with Consuela. Without her to watch over me..." Cortez laughed. "If I had to choose between her and one of my brothers, I would choose her. I can always hire a factory manager. What sort of man is this - Jacobs, you say? You know, when I was a boy, I wanted to be a policeman, to carry the gun and drive the car. To be the chief police officer, that must be a grand thing."

"Mainly his job is shuffling papers - I get to do a lot of the filing, and dictation. When you are the head, your job is mainly doing budgets and meetings."

"But surely he gets to know the - the good things, yes? The best part of being a policeman - it must be the best thing, to know the things that other people do not. To know who are the criminals, and to hunt them."

"And other things. It isn't just police work. They also do counterespionage. Chasing spies," she added.

"That is CIA, no?"

"No. I can't talk about it, of course, but, no, that is a Bureau function. It's all the same, really, and it's not like television at all. Mainly it's boring. I read the reports all the time."

"Amazing," Cortez observed comfortably. "All the talents of a woman, and also she educates me." He smiled encouragement so that she would elaborate. That idiot who'd put him onto her, he remembered, suggested that he'd have to use money. Cortez thought that his KGB training officers would have been proud of his technique. The KGB was ever parsimonious with funds.

"Does he make you work so hard?" Cortez asked a minute later.

"Some of the days can go long, but really he's pretty good about that."

"If he makes you work too hard, we will speak, Mr. Jacobs and I. What if I come to Washington and I cannot see you because you are working?"

"You really want...?"

"Moira." His voice changed its timbre. Cortez knew that he'd pressed too hard for a first time. It had gone too easily, and he'd asked too many questions. After all, lonely widow or not, this was a woman of substance and responsibility - therefore a woman of intellect. But she was also a woman of feelings, and of passion. He moved his hands and his head. He saw the question on her face: Again? He smiled his message: Again.

This time he was less patient, no longer a man exploring the unknown. There was familiarity now. Having established what she liked, his ministrations had direction. Within ten minutes she'd forgotten all of his questions. She would remember the smell and the feel of him. She would bask in the return of youth. She would ask herself where things might lead, but not how they had started.

Assignations are conspiratorial by their nature. Just after midnight he returned her to where her car was parked. Yet again she amazed him with her silence. She held his hand like a schoolgirl, yet her touch was in no way so simple. One last kiss before she left the car - she wouldn't let him get out.

"Thank you, Juan," she said quietly.

Cortez spoke from the heart. "Moira, because of you I am again a man. You have done more for me. When next I come to Washington, we must -"

"We will."

He followed her most of the way home, to let her know that he wished to protect her, breaking off before getting so close to her home that her children - surely they were waiting up - would notice. Cortez drove back to the apartment with a smile on his face, only partly because of his mission.

Her co- workers knew at once. With little more than six hours' sleep, Moira bounced into the office wearing a suit she hadn't touched in a year. There was a sparkle in her eye that could not be hidden. Even Director Jacobs noticed, but no one said anything. Jacobs understood. He'd buried his wife only a few months after Moira's loss, and learned that such voids in one's life could never quite be filled with work. Good for her , he thought. She still had children at home. He'd have to go easier on her schedule. She deserved another chance at a real life.

8. Deployment

THE AMAZING THING was how smoothly things had gone, Chavez thought. After all, they were all sergeants, but whoever had set this thing up had been a clever man because there had been no groping around for which man got which function. There was an operations sergeant in his squad to assist Captain Ramirez with planning. There was a medical corpsman, a good one from the Special Forces who already had his weapons training. Julio Vega and Juan Piscador had once been machine-gunners, and they got the SAWs. The same story applied to their radioman. Each member of the team fit neatly into a preselected slot, all were sufficiently trained that they respected the expertise of one another, and further cross-training enhanced that respect even more. The rugged regime of exercises had extended the pride with which each had arrived, and within two weeks the team had meshed together like a finely made machine. Chavez, a Ranger School graduate, was point man and scout. His job was to probe ahead, to move silently from one place of concealment to another, to watch and listen, then report his observations to Captain Ramirez.

"Okay, where are they?" the captain asked.

"Two hundred meters, just around that corner," Chavez whispered in reply. "Five of them. Three asleep, two awake. One's sitting by the fire. The other one's got an SMG, walking around some."